Bangladesh is a case study of a country which is slowly becoming more fundamentalist. Consider the most recent example:

Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in
the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a
woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court
building.

The hard-liners argue that Islam does not allow the depiction* of living beings in art. Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina appears to have consented to the removal of the statue which was only erected five months ago.

I cannot tell if she believes that such a compromise would make the hard-liners content or if she has other political motivations. Nevertheless, Bangladesh already suffers from extremist violence:

In recent years, its authorities have struggled to contain extremist violence against religious minorities, foreigners, gay people and secular intellectuals. Attendance at madrasas, or Islamic schools, is swelling, and more women are wearing the hijab, or head scarf.

What drives this radicalization in Bangladesh? Is it supported by the petro-dollars or is it home-grown or both? Whatever the seeds that have been sewn, the harvest is not something the world might want to gather.

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* This is based on the sayings of Mohammed, the hadiths, and not on the Quran, as far as I can tell. The original intention was most likely to ban idolatry.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

1. Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the Montana special election, joined the war against the media by allegedly assaulting Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the UK Guardian. Gianforte's spokesman gave a statement which ends with:

It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.

There ya go. What did Ben Jacobs do to make Gianforte so mad? Sounds like the kind of stuff domestic abusers say (you made me do it).

2. Our Dear Leader is workinghard to be the PR person for the United States. It's great comedy or would be, if I was watching it with nectar and manna at hand on some other planet.

The man has no social intelligence. I guess he has never needed it, what with having been born with a golden hoof in his mouth and having grown up the little king of his world, surrounded by yes-men and yes-women.

3. Mick Mulvaney, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget removes his human mask and bluntly states his views:*

For years, we’ve focused on how we can help Americans receive taxpayer-funded assistance. Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re now looking at how we can respect both those who require assistance and the taxpayers who fund that support. For the first time in a long time, we’re putting taxpayers first.

Taking money from someone without an intention to pay it back is not debt. It is theft. This budget makes it clear that we will reverse this larceny. The president’s budget will put our country’s budget back into balance.

Taxation is theft, eh? I doubt Mulvaney thinks that giving even more money to the already-bloated US military is theft. But subsidizing the health care costs of poor people certainly is.

President Donald Trump's budget plans to cut the Children's Health Insurance Program by at least 20% over the next two fiscal years and slash Medicaid, which covers millions more children.Millions of poor and working families could lose their health coverage if his proposed budget, released Tuesday and called "A New Foundation for American Greatness," gets through as-is. It would hit children's health care hard and break Trump's campaign promise to "save" Medicaid "without cuts."Over the next decade, the proposed budget would cut Medicaid more than $800 billion, or nearly a quarter of what the health care program is projected to spend on poor families. Poor children are covered by a complicated mix of programs. Medicaid covers 37 million children. The Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, has 8.9 million enrolled. Together, these two programs cover about one in three American children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“If you’re on food stamps and you’re
able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” Mulvaney said during a briefing
with reporters on Monday. “If you’re on disability insurance and you’re
not supposed to be, if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go
back to work. We need everybody pulling in the same direction.”

But the way to fix such misuse should be to supervise the basis on which help is given, not to cut the total amount of money going into, say, the CHIP program. Children shouldn't have to go back to work or be punished for having bad parents.

Their job is to go to school, and healthy children will do that job better and end up more productive and useful citizens, ultimately benefiting everyone in the society, even Mick Mulvaney.

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* This proposal may never turn into reality, but it tells us what the Trump administration would like to happen.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Or the start of my begging week* which will run to the end of next week's Wednesday. This year I have an actual project (other than the usual expenses), and that is my need for a new computer. This one (bought by my lovely readers, by the way, in 2008) is beginning to misbehave. It's slow as molasses in January, and I want to be ready for its demise.

Please do not give if you are poor. The ways to give are described in the left column. If you prefer not to use PayPal, send me an email about other ways for me to get money for a computer and chocolate.

May I take this opportunity to thank you all for reading, for your past contributions and for being you. I also want to thank those of you who send me a little every month. I only recently found out how to send those folks thank-you emails. My silence was not ingratitude, in other words.

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* That odd part of Echidne must pick the worst time of the year for the funding week! I still feel embarrassed about asking for money, even though I do work very very hard on the stories I put up here.

Most politics has those incredible paradoxes, the kinds which any observer from outer space would immediately place one of her twenty-one fingers on and then shake her three heads with great sadness, trying to understand them. In this case the paradox is why the country* which is the home of the most extremist religious ideology in Islam would now build a center to combat its own messages to the rest of the world.

After all, the petro-dollars have financed Wahhabist mosques all over the world, including in Europe, and it is the ur-conservative and extremely literal Wahhabist interpretations of the Quran which the terrorists in ISIS, for example, have partly used to create their own theological justifications for terror attacks, slavery, the wholesale killing of those whose religious beliefs differ, and the extreme oppression of women.

But then similar paradoxes abound elsewhere, too. The United States is not exactly innocent in that respect, either.

Still, it's imperative to address the long-term negative effects of religious extremism which is rearing its ugly head not just in Islam but also in Christianity and Hinduism.

This is particularly crucial for the equality of women and men, because extremists/literalists always base their views of women's proper roles on what ancient nomadic herding societies thought those were, and then desire to make them today's norms. Indeed, one might even argue that the rise of religious fundamentalism may be a partial response to women's increasing rights.

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* The word "country" is here used to refer to the rulers and clergy of Saudi Arabia, not the ordinary citizens of the country.

It is essentially a stack of papers telling Republicans that they are free to go wild butchering essential pieces of the safety net
in order to fund extraordinary tax cuts for the wealthy and increased
defense spending. Food stamps? In Trump’s proposal, the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program gets $193 billion in cuts over 10 years,
and would allow states to stiffen work requirements for the program.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, aka welfare as we now know it?
Its already anemic funding gets slashed by $21 billion. The
administration is already trying to spin this kind of hatchet work as “welfare reform”—but
it's mostly just a signal to conservatives that they can get their
cleavers out, should they feel compelled. The same goes for the $800
billion in Medicaid cuts, which mirror the reductions in the House
health care bill, and the reported reductions to Social Security Disability Insurance.

A harsher, more cruel country is in the making. But at least the market for yachts will boom.

The UK Guardian writes about Facebook and moderation. The article makes for interesting reading. The following table gives examples about violent comments which are acceptable (the green check mark) and those which are not (the red x):

Put your thinking caps on and figure out why someone cannot say "stab and become the fear of the Zionists," but can say "kick a person with red hair." Or why it's perfectly fine to teach someone how to kill "a bitch."

I understand why the advocating of violence against a named person is not allowed. But the Zionists are a group of unnamed individuals, and so are people with red hair or fat people. And women certainly are a demographic group. Yet only the hate message to Zionists would cause it to be deleted.

Facebook: Where millions of people exchange funny cat videos, cute baby pictures and advice on how to snap the neck of a bitch...

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